How about a button to bring up the hints window directly from the main screen? Well, assuming there’s only one mission active…

One other thought I had is that there’s kinda a difference between a “training” mission and a “real” (or whatever to call it) one.

For a training type/tutorial mission I think it would be nice to have the individual steps showing up using your little banner mechanism that the game intro uses. For a more advanced thing it seems that the fun of it is figuring it out (since you should already have a clue).

I'm not 100% sure what you mean on the steps/banner thing. I could see how some of the missions could have steps -- like "craft a hoe" could have steps:* Collect 2 wood* Craft 4 lumber* Craft a wooden tool handle* Craft a wooden hoe

(That's what you have to do to craft a hoe), but it seems like those steps would show up as "hints", I'm not sure what the "help banner" angle is.

Also, I think I want to reserve that banner for "help" to keep it separate from the missions UI. The help-banner is also slightly "modal" and dismissing one forces the next one to come up.

Cribbing hints from Farmville-2, a mission with multiple steps just shows the steps and, once a step is completed, it gets a checkmark. We could do something like that, I think.

If you have other ideas about how the UI should work, please let us know!